Diana Alt [00:00:04]:
Hey, Diana Alt here. And this is Work Should Feel Good, the podcast where your career growth meets your real life. Each week I share stories, strategies, and mindset shifts to help you build a work life that works for you on your terms. Hey, hey, hey. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Work Should Feel Good, the show where your career growth meets your real life. I'm your host, Diana Alt, and today my guest Matt Koppel and I are going to talk about what it is really like to make that leap from the corporate tech job into solo consulting. Matt is a friend of mine for a number of years and he also is a strategic data consultant with people skills, business acumen, and also zero interest in gatekeeping technical knowledge. He's loved playing with technology ever since he learned how to write naughty words on his dad's calculator as a kid, Matt and his wife Tamara founded Grand river analytics to help companies unleash the power of their data and also raise up the next generation of data professionals.

Diana Alt [00:01:13]:
Welcome to the show. Matt. How are you doing this morning, man?

Matthew Copple [00:01:17]:
I'm excited. Thank you. This is going to be fun. Looking forward to it.

Diana Alt [00:01:22]:
You and I always have fun when we're talking.

Matthew Copple [00:01:24]:
We do.

Diana Alt [00:01:27]:
What's really interesting is we have talked a lot about your business and some stuff I think started getting unleashed for you whenever we had the night in the library. Like I came over to your house, we sat up in this. Matt and Tamara have a beautiful, like, library overlooking their living room with recliners and chilling out. And so we started chatting about this and decided we wanted to do some work together and we wanted to do this podcast because there's so many people that are just acting like this is easy, like on LinkedIn or all the places. Like they're basically doing the hustle cluster, bro. It's all easy. Just write the perfect content and it's not easy. So I'm really glad to have you here today.

Diana Alt [00:02:13]:
My first question for you, though, is a little bit of a way back thing. So you mentioned in some info you submitted to me you're a huge history buff, especially the Civil War. What got you into that? And tell us also a little bit, is there anything about that that you feel like helps you in your career as a technologist and in your business.

Matthew Copple [00:02:40]:
In an ideal utopian world where money didn't matter and I would be a history professor.

Diana Alt [00:02:52]:
The Civil War, what you would teach.

Matthew Copple [00:02:54]:
I would probably teach. Well, I don't think it would matter. Military history is really what I mean. Civil War is kind of my current dig. But I. It's sort of, in a way, it's sort of a sad story, but it is, it is important. That got me into history. And it was two things.

Matthew Copple [00:03:11]:
First of all, and I'd go over to my grandma's house in a little bitty town called Dawn, Missouri, literally a one horse town. She had this beautiful glass fronted bookcase with a bunch of very old books. And in that set of books were some old, old encyclopedias. And I would get bored at grandma's house when my friends weren't over and I needed to do something. And I love to read. So I pulled out those encyclopedias and what, at one point there was, there was an entry on the Roman Empire.

Diana Alt [00:03:47]:
Oh.

Matthew Copple [00:03:48]:
Thought that was amazing. And then around that same year, I think it was when I was about 12 is when I started doing that. That year my grandfather passed away and he was in the hospital at St. Mary's Hospital, which today is the IRS. And of course the family wanted to say goodbye to grandfather, but they didn't want the kids around. So they sent my aunt with my brothers and I out and she didn't know what to do with this because, you know, I mean it's, it's emotionally tough and we're little, we're kids. And so we ended up walking up the hill to the Liberty Memorial.

Diana Alt [00:04:31]:
Okay. Like two weeks ago.

Matthew Copple [00:04:36]:
Well, this was my first time when I was 12 years old. 1982.

Diana Alt [00:04:39]:
Okay.

Matthew Copple [00:04:40]:
And the museum didn't exist at the time. It was just the two exhibit halls. And so she walked us into the exhibit hall that had at the time all of the. One of them has a big mural, the other one had a bunch of uniforms. And I didn't want her to let me. I didn't want to leave you just.

Diana Alt [00:04:59]:
Wanted to hang out there. I am, I just went to that museum with my friend Brandon who is very, he's a marketing professional, very into like, like politics from the local all the way up to the national level. Has been forever. And we just decided to go there one Sunday recently. And I'm always obsessed with like the stuff the humans used. So I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like some statesmen did stupid stuff and invaded something. Like.

Diana Alt [00:05:33]:
That's cool, cool. Thanks for telling me. Let's look at the uniforms of all the different countries of people represented and fighting in World War I. Like I could look at that stuff all day. So I hear you.

Matthew Copple [00:05:44]:
Do you feel connection to it too, in that?

Diana Alt [00:05:48]:
Tell me more.

Matthew Copple [00:05:49]:
Two things. Number one, my grandfather was actually drafted for World War I. Wow. Yeah. My grandfather and his brother were drafted for World War I. My grandfather was much, much older. My grandmother. But the other thing is, is that when they built the new memorial, they raised money for it by selling bricks, where you commemorate.

Matthew Copple [00:06:09]:
And so my. My mother and my wife purchased a brick for me. I'm a veteran of the United States Army. I was a. When I was a kid, I was in the Army Reserve, and I served in Desert Storm and Desert Shield. So they actually purchased a brick for me. And so that kind of gives me a very. As part of the fundraiser.

Matthew Copple [00:06:33]:
And so that.

Diana Alt [00:06:33]:
That's.

Matthew Copple [00:06:34]:
And also other other veterans in my family, including my brother.

Diana Alt [00:06:39]:
You have been, like, just interested since you were a kid. And alongside building this business and this tech career, you've been deepening your interest in history. That's very cool. You're interested. You and I are both interested in everything. We could talk all day about. Throw a topic at us, and we will go for an hour. How do you feel like that curiosity about history plays into your career in data?

Matthew Copple [00:07:10]:
I think it's my curiosity in general.

Diana Alt [00:07:13]:
Okay.

Matthew Copple [00:07:13]:
My mother used to literally say, there's an old saying, curiosity killed the cat.

Diana Alt [00:07:18]:
Yeah.

Matthew Copple [00:07:19]:
My mother would say, curiosity killed the map. I've always been the kid who liked to wander. I was always the kid who liked to explore. I love to read, and I've always been insanely curious. Now, data in particular kind of appealed to me as well. Because data is your history.

Diana Alt [00:07:41]:
Yes.

Matthew Copple [00:07:42]:
It's not just your company's history. I mean, all of history is. History itself is written material. That's what. That's what history is officially defined as. So it is data in itself.

Diana Alt [00:07:57]:
And what's so interesting to me is we hear as kids or, like, really anytime, but I definitely remember hearing this in history class as a kid, that if you don't learn your history, you're doomed to repeat it. So we talk about that from the macro scale, but you do the same thing from the micro scale, because we're supposed to use history to inform us on geopolitical events. You know, how do we treat people? How do we interact with other countries and civilizations and cultures? And you do the same thing with your data, only you're trying to figure out what's the product I should build next, or, you know, we. We're not doing great on customer satisfaction. What can many mind from that? And learn to change. So I love that. I love that perspective.

Matthew Copple [00:08:45]:
So it doesn't matter what size your business is? No, we talk about business intelligence, the intelligence of Your business, the brain of your business is the data that you produce every single day. And so many businesses don't understand how valuable that is. A lot of us, because, you know, we have to run a business every day. We know we need to be looking at our financials, and we know we need to be forecasting our financials. And maybe we have a software application that we're building that we use data for because we want to give our customers the ability to be able to use our software better or to run their businesses better. But many of us don't think about using our data to run our own businesses together. We don't think about for finding new products, for researching our competitors, for figuring out what we've been doing right and doing wrong. The only data we usually.

Matthew Copple [00:09:45]:
I found that lots of people, lots of businesses look at is we look at our financials, but that's half of it. And it's not even half.

Diana Alt [00:09:54]:
Yeah, it's. It's important. And I tell you what, it's better than people that don't look at their financials. I have a client who has an accounting background. I met with her yesterday, and we were just brainstorming things for, like, what she does and doesn't want in her next job. And she has also the ability to. To do like, operations or project management type stuff like that kind of work too. And she said, like, one of the big reasons she left her last company is because it was a real small business.

Diana Alt [00:10:26]:
They didn't really understand the concept of a profit. Like, the idea of managing financials to become a sustainably profitable business was new to them. And she likes to, like, unwrangle, you know, detangle stuff. So great, like, I will untangle your book so you can see what it is. But then if they don't actually want to take other actions to be profitable, you can't do anything but right. Really gave them the tools to be more organized about that. So you done a lot of things I didn't realize, actually, about your time in the military. That's very cool.

Diana Alt [00:11:04]:
How did you go from the military into this data career? Like, well, give the Cliffs Notes to that.

Matthew Copple [00:11:12]:
There wasn't really a From the military to the data career. I was.

Diana Alt [00:11:17]:
I feel like there's a few steps in the middle.

Matthew Copple [00:11:19]:
I was a teenager, and everybody in my school, all the boys in my school, it's just what you did. All of our parents had served, you know, in Vietnam or. Or at some. And so all of us, we just felt like that was what we needed to do, you know, and I grew up in the Cold War and watching Red dawn and Wolverines, right. So, yeah, I just had this overwhelming urge to want to go and, you know, fight World War III and die bravely in the folded gap.

Diana Alt [00:11:46]:
But we're not doing that.

Matthew Copple [00:11:49]:
No. And I'm glad World War III didn't come out too. I, it would be a real crimp on the, on the career World War three, but it was, it was something that I did because I was patriotic. At the time I wanted to serve. I did not want to serve full time. I had thought about doing that, but my parents were very much against that. And so serving as a weekend warrior, so to speak, was. It gave me some, a little bit of extra cash on that I could, you know, spend at college.

Matthew Copple [00:12:21]:
And it was, it scratched my patriotic itch. And I, and I got to travel, right? I mean, I got to, I got to go to Saudi Arabia and Iraq. I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't joined. So it wasn't exactly join the army and see the world, but it did open my eyes. It gave me some discipline. I got to see some things that I never would have seen as a 19 year old kid. Now as a 20 year old when I was in the Gulf. Now as a parent, of course, knowing what I put my mother through, probably I wouldn't want my son putting me through that.

Matthew Copple [00:13:03]:
But I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I was just thinking, I just, I want to serve. And it, I served in a postal unit. I was, I was an army mailman. That's what I was with a little unit out of Bethany, Missouri called the 795th General Company. Yep, I went to Bethany, Missouri, which is not far from where I grew up. But it was, it was, it's. I would say it's not something that I, that I think about a lot.

Matthew Copple [00:13:32]:
It was a, it was a great experience. I wasn't even a programmer during that time.

Diana Alt [00:13:38]:
So what were you doing for work early on? Because I know you, like you did some other things because you and I talked about you. You were at DST some years ago, like 2006 or something. You started DST and you were in testing then. So what did you do earlier in your career and when did you pivot into engineering?

Matthew Copple [00:14:01]:
I, I did what I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. In 93. I dropped out of college, got married, my wife finished, and I had no clue what I wanted to do. So my very first Job, full time job out of college, being married, was working in a. Working retail at a Sears store in Columbia, Missouri. And I went from admin job to kind of admin job. I did administrative assistant at a home healthcare agency for a while. I spent a few months sorting books overnight at a, in a warehouse.

Matthew Copple [00:14:43]:
And then I got a job finally at an insurance company in Columbia, Missouri as again as another basically administrative assistant. And I'd always enjoyed technology. I didn't go into technology because I was afraid of math. I didn't like math as a kid. And when I got into college I found out that I went to the University of Missouri at Columbia and I found out that to be able to get into their computer science program, you had to take like three semesters at calculus and a whole bunch of other math. Math course.

Diana Alt [00:15:13]:
Yeah.

Matthew Copple [00:15:14]:
And I said man, I'm not doing that. Yeah, that's too much math. I was scared of it. And so. But by the time I got up to, to shelter insurance, I had started actually doing some programming in a program something called Lotus Symphony, which was a spreadsheet kind of like, like, like Word Today.

Diana Alt [00:15:36]:
Yeah.

Matthew Copple [00:15:37]:
Or like Office Today.

Diana Alt [00:15:38]:
I haven't talked about, thought about Lotus and.

Matthew Copple [00:15:41]:
Yeah. And so I did some macro programming in it and I also had done some training for some of my co workers because this was the era when everybody and their mother was getting on the Internet. And so I was training my older co workers on how to get on the Internet and use America, use aol.

Diana Alt [00:15:58]:
Because you're like what do you mean a spreadsheet? Like what is, what even is that? Yeah, I was in college at the same time taking chemistry labs where we're having to plot stuff on graphs and I'm like, I don't know how to do that. Can I please draw this? I mean I drew it in high school, so yeah, I feel you.

Matthew Copple [00:16:21]:
But, but the, the catalyst was one of the underwriters in that group said her husband was like, I think the director or a manager over there in the computer science department at, at that company. And we're now in, it's 1997 is when the, the date is now. And all, all these companies that have mainframes, which shelter was on a mainframe, there was like maybe two or three PCs on our floor. It was all mainframe terminals and they were trying to get ready for Y2K and they were literally importing developers. They had rented some, some dorms from the University of Missouri so that they could put developers up that they were bringing in by the Boatload to help fix their systems. And so she told her husband about me programming. And he's like, I heard that you can do computer programming. I said, oh, yeah, since I was in high school.

Matthew Copple [00:17:17]:
I took programming class in high school. I love it.

Diana Alt [00:17:19]:
And he says, you ended up doing Y2K stuff, huh? You ended up doing Y2K stuff.

Matthew Copple [00:17:27]:
No, what really happened is I went down there, I took the test, I blew it away. HR did not even. I went to hr, took the test, he walked me down there, blew it away. HR did not even bother to call me back. He comes back up to my desk a few weeks later and says, where's your resume? I thought we were going to be interviewing you. And I said, hey, I took the test. I thought I did well on it.

Diana Alt [00:17:50]:
But.

Matthew Copple [00:17:52]:
Nobody'S called me. And we went there. They required you to have a college degree.

Diana Alt [00:17:57]:
So you didn't have the bachelor's yet.

Matthew Copple [00:17:58]:
You didn't even have to program. They taught you to program. They were importing people into this for contracts. They were spending weeks teaching them how to program in cobol and they weren't even. But. But you had to have a college degree. So somebody who already knew they wouldn't do it. So I got, I got mad.

Matthew Copple [00:18:20]:
I don't do this very often, but I got mad and I just decided, this is silly. I can do this. I'm going to Kansas City and I'm going to get my college degree and I'm going to. To get into it.

Diana Alt [00:18:33]:
Cool.

Matthew Copple [00:18:34]:
I just made the decision and my wife and I literally, we quit. We cashed out our 401ks. Not something I would recommend doing, by the way.

Diana Alt [00:18:41]:
Yeah, yeah.

Matthew Copple [00:18:43]:
We cashed out our retirement and we said, we're moving to Kansas City and the rest is history. I was able very shortly after that to get a position. A good friend of mine who'd also moved to Kansas City about the same time from Columbia, he became a help desk manager. And he said, I need a manager. So, I mean, I need another help desk associate. Come.

Diana Alt [00:19:08]:
So you worked your way up, basically.

Matthew Copple [00:19:10]:
I worked my way up. I've done help desk. Then I did Linux system administration. I did business analysis and product management. And then when I got to dst, I was a business analyst. And there they had another moment where they're needing to recruit developers. And this time I applied and they let me in. So 2009, I got into their programming program and got into their data, onto their data conversion team and absolutely loved it.

Matthew Copple [00:19:46]:
That was what I was just neck deep in Data and doing data conversions. And I really learned all the principles of data engineering, which I learned today. I learned on that team. I spent 11 years.

Diana Alt [00:19:57]:
It's unreal how much we try to pretend like all the new tech, all the ways we have to access data, the advent of Agile, that everything is different. And it kind of is and it kind of isn't. Speaking of the new and different, I want to fast, I'm going to zoom forward, zoom forward. I'm going to zoom forward to the world of AI. So one thing I wanted to know is we all kind of were astounded, some good, some bad. In November of 22, whenever ChatGPT went mainstream and we started as laypeople hearing about AI, which has been around forever, like I was in College in 1990, whatever, and they were talking about AI and neural nets then. What is the first change that you saw as a data professional related to AI? So not necessarily us, like turning ourselves into Muppets with Dolly, but what was the first kind of things that you saw? Oh, there's a pivot. We're doing AI things now in your career.

Matthew Copple [00:21:10]:
Well, it was really before AI is when I saw it and it's when I went to work for a company here in Kansas City after I left DST as their data engineer and it was working with their data scientists and we were implementing machine learning models, sentiment analysis. I remember working on a project with some of them where we were basically going through a bunch of emails that customers went back and forth doing qualitative stuff.

Diana Alt [00:21:42]:
That's cool.

Matthew Copple [00:21:43]:
Well, I. And they, they were doing most of the, of the quantitative stuff.

Diana Alt [00:21:47]:
You and the not me sense of the word you. Yeah, but they were looking at that data, those emails, quantitatively and qualitatively.

Matthew Copple [00:21:55]:
Exactly. Trying to say, hey, are these people wanting to buy and what can we do to. What can we do to tweak these messages so that people have more buying? And, and I realized at that point, I said, you know, this is a small company that's doing this. And I thought to myself, you know, this is something that I remember when DST Systems, the company that I worked for there, I remember when they announced very gleefully they were getting into the world of data and they had a data science team, but once they announced their data science team, nobody ever heard from them again. He did a lot of good, I don't know. But I, I just didn't hear much from them. And so this was really the first time I had been exposed to data science. And I was like, well, this is going to go everywhere.

Matthew Copple [00:22:40]:
I mean, every company is going to be doing this. It's inexpensive. We're not paying much to, to do this. I mean, the data scientists and me, I got good, good salaries, but it's not that costly. But then we fast forward again a few years to 2022, and the very first time I used GitHub, Copilot, which is the tool that I mostly use, I started as soon as it came out in public preview. I signed up for it and started using it on personal projects. And I was blown away.

Diana Alt [00:23:14]:
You love it. You're an early adopter. You like technology in general. One thing I'm curious about is, because what's super wild to me is I look at resumes and LinkedIn profiles and whatnot of job seekers and people trying to get promoted and all that stuff all the time. And even in tech, a very small amount of people are talking about the use of AI tools in making their work more effective. So even a software engineer might be saying, well, I know this, that, and Python and I can build predictive models and yada, yada, yada, but they forget to say that they use Copilot. They don't think about that. So it's one thing I'm curious, and I just worked on your resume yesterday, so we should probably add some of that.

Diana Alt [00:24:11]:
But how many developers have you worked with or talked to that actually don't like it? They're skeptical of Copilot and kind of, what are you seeing in trends related to the actual work of an engineer? Not the products you create, but what it's like to work as an engineer.

Matthew Copple [00:24:33]:
So it's. Strangely enough, it is. I, I do know quite a few engineers who dislike it intensely. It gets in the way of their process. They like doing things manually. They like, they like being inside the code, typing the code. They're craftsmen. And I understand that.

Matthew Copple [00:24:54]:
I love that. I love that, too. That, I think, is something that many software engineers share. You like the thought that this stuff that you're building is yours, and the idea that there's an AI involved in it somewhere makes it feel right. And then, of course, there's the very legitimate fears that AI is going to automate much of what we do and therefore make us obsolete. So, yes, I see that. But what I also see is a lot of excitement. As people are, especially senior engineers like myself, I hear a lot of excitement, people saying, you know, we spend a lot of time doing the equivalent of dredge work to build programs, lots of scaffolding, lots of boilerplate code, lots of simple stuff and I really want to spend my time doing more complicated stuff.

Matthew Copple [00:25:47]:
I want to be able to build bigger projects, more challenging projects. And it's been very hard to do for several years because we're chronically short of talent. Yeah. And even when you have enough talent, writing software is hard and it's very manual and it's very error prone. That's why we have all these happening.

Diana Alt [00:26:10]:
Like I can fully understand those really killer senior engineers embracing this so that they can work on the cool parts of the problem. What have you seen so far in the companies you've worked with, either full time or as a consultant happening to the junior and mid level developers? How is it impacting that work?

Matthew Copple [00:26:37]:
It's. I don't think that we've seen the worst of it yet. It's mostly for impacting juniors and mid levels. This is mostly something that you're seeing in large enterprises right now, things. But it's going to trickle down. We are probably going to be doing more with fewer lower level workers. I don't like that particularly because you can't become a senior until you start as a junior. Yeah, but I still think we're going to have juniors.

Matthew Copple [00:27:08]:
It's just they're going to be expected to have a higher level of.

Diana Alt [00:27:12]:
I think that it really is going to impact the computer science program.

Matthew Copple [00:27:16]:
Oh, it is. We're going to have to change.

Diana Alt [00:27:19]:
They're already behind. But if they churn out graduates that know code, how to write code from like that junior level, but they don't know how to leverage AI, the expectation is basically going to change. When you and I got out of college. Well, you graduated a few years later than I did because you took that break. But when we got out, it was a big deal to know how to do Word in Excel. It was literally in 1997 a big deal. If you could do basic stuff in Excel and like moderate stuff in Word and now you look silly if you even list it on a resume unless you are doing that higher level programming work. So I think it's going to change what's expected.

Matthew Copple [00:28:05]:
I think that we. Because the thing is is that we were already short of computer science and programmers. It's always been hard to hire enough programmers. Right. So I think we're still going to have that problem. And therefore, while, yes, I think jobs are going to change, they're going to be in different places. I still think that computer science is going to be a career for quite some time. That a new graduate can go into.

Diana Alt [00:28:33]:
I think it will too. Especially when you think like, when you think about ethical AI. A lot of it has to do with like not letting it become Terminator. Like we want to make sure that the humans still have their thumb on the pulse of the AI. So when news comes out, that was it Google, there was news recently that some big company doing AI has the AI writing the AI that writes the AI or whatever that stuff is. And that's going to happen, but we're always going to want to have humans be able to understand what the AI is doing. So we people, we were going to talk about the switch. And so let's talk for a little bit about your transition from solo from full time tech monkey at the corporate level into this solo consulting work.

Diana Alt [00:29:24]:
The first thing I wanted to know is like what led to the decision? What helped you have that gumption to jump off the cliff because you'd had the LLC for a while, like you'd have the container to do work on the side. You and Tamara founded that. But what made you finally go, it's time?

Matthew Copple [00:29:41]:
Probably the most boring thing in the world and that is that my son was getting ready to graduate from college. And I once he did that, then I was no longer on the hook for paying his tuition. And suddenly I had much fewer things to have to worry about as far as my financial obligations in the world. So I could, I could afford to be able to do it. And I've wanted to, to become an entrepreneur, at least to try it for many, many years. My parents, grandparents were entrepreneurs at various parts of their times, their lives. And I wanted to try it and see what would happen. Would I enjoy it? I didn't know.

Matthew Copple [00:30:19]:
I thought I might, but I wanted to try.

Diana Alt [00:30:22]:
Yeah, I think that, that I did that. I had kind of the same story and I probably. Funny, I didn't have kid to put through college, but I probably could have afforded to do it sooner. But I had the combination of that. I'd been successfully doing some work on the side and then I just had that one, that one too many changes that happened at the job. And I was like, okay, we're done. I've been here a long time, we are done now. So you and I kind of came to the same decision for slightly different reasons.

Diana Alt [00:30:52]:
But having that thinking about the finances behind it, like it is romantic to say I'm just gonna believe in myself and do it. It's not a very good reality. At the same time, there's a lot of advice out there that says you should be replacing like half to two thirds of your full time income with your side work before you make the jump. I definitely didn't do that. I didn't have the energy to do that. So how did you think about that part? Cause you're like, yeah, I don't have to pay for Noah's school anymore. But also, were you doing anything whenever you left or did you start from zero revenue?

Matthew Copple [00:31:34]:
I had some, I had some revenue when I, when I left.

Diana Alt [00:31:39]:
Yay. What was your first revenue that you were working on right after you went full time?

Matthew Copple [00:31:45]:
Well, it was, it was. I had a contract with somebody that I'd had a contract with prior to as a side hustle and I continued with that and the, the idea. Well, all right, so real, real history here, folks. I'm not going to give you the one quick way to make a successful business because I broke every rule and that I didn't think a lot about it. It was a very impulsive decision and it was something I thought about a lot. I did not have a problem with my, with my full time job at all. The people that were great, it was, it was fine. But I wanted to do more and I scratched the.

Matthew Copple [00:32:24]:
I didn't just want to be, at the time, I didn't just want to be a senior engineer. I wanted to. I have had for many years many opinions on the role of analytics in the workplace and bringing it down from big companies with their big gigantic data science teams down to the level of small and mid sized businesses because we all need it. And I thought, I've got that capability, I can do that communication, I enjoy doing that. And I was like, all I'm doing here at this thing is I'm pushing data back and forth. There's nothing wrong with that. It paid very well, but I just felt like there was more that I could do. We went on a cruise and we had some discussions with a common friend of ours while we were, while we were with them about the things that I felt like I could do and they were very encouraging and Tamara has been encouraging me for years.

Matthew Copple [00:33:26]:
And so I just said I, I didn't have six months of income. We had some savings, but I didn't have six months of income. I wasn't replacing my income, to be quite honest with you. I just, and at the time as well, I was wanting to be involved. There was another friend of mine who had a, a, what I thought was a promising startup in the marketing space and I kind of wanted to be involved with that too. And so I said, you know what, I'll, I just continue to do this as a side hustle. Maybe I can work with the marketing startup. I'll see if this thing builds.

Matthew Copple [00:33:57]:
I'll do it for a few months. If it's not successful, I'll just go back to work. I will. I'm, I'm a talented guy. I've got a good history. I think I'll be able to find work. So I said, we said, you know, the worst thing that could possibly happen is I work on this for a few months, I make no money whatsoever, I blow through the savings and then voila, I've got to send out a resume and find another job.

Diana Alt [00:34:26]:
Really, what's the pain there, right?

Matthew Copple [00:34:28]:
I'm not going to go homeless. I'm not going to stop eating.

Diana Alt [00:34:31]:
I really appreciate that you talk about that because so many people, whether the issue is that they want to switch jobs or whether they're burned out and they want to take a break, or whether they want to try doing what you and I did, which is say, forget it to our six figure careers and try our own thing, somehow people go to, immediately to, I'm not going to be able to eat and live indoors. And I don't mean to dismiss the people that really are that financially close to the edge that they could not do this, ripping off the band aid, but really most of the people that you and I have worked with that might aspire to this don't have to worry about that. They have skills. So you founded the business to be a side thing, like you and Tamara had done that earlier on when you very, very first started the business. So before you went full time, what were the first one or two things that you did when you founded the business? Like, did you just say, I'm Matt and I can do some stuff for you? Did you develop like a business name and some branding? Did you make a product offering? What did you do first?

Matthew Copple [00:35:46]:
Very first thing that we did was we decided, I had a conversation over dinner with a friend of mine who said, you know, I'm looking for some, I'm looking for somebody to do some work for me. And I was myself thinking I wanted to make a little extra money at the time to help pay for my, we were saving up for my son's tuition at that point. And I said, I would like to, to have a little bit of extra income in so that I can pay his college tuition and maybe throw some money in savings, you know, whatever. So I decided to create a business. Now I knew that I didn't want to do a sole proprietorship. And I actually had another entrepreneurial venture back in 2000 at the turn of the century where my little brother and I had a computer store in a town called Chillicothe, Missouri. And it didn't go for very long because it was his business and I was mostly there supporting him in the business because obviously I lived in Kansas City a couple hours away, but I was there, you know, to. I would come down on weekends or whenever I wasn't working and man store and stuff.

Matthew Copple [00:36:54]:
And I knew from that process that I needed to. Number one, it should not be a sole proprietorship but number two, I needed to have some legal stuff in place because obviously I didn't want to put my home, my, you know, assets at risk. So the first thing that I did was we came up with a name which I, I think we've discussed. I told you earlier today was kind of a. I just came up with the name Grand river analytics based upon where I grew up and because it was a, it was an available domain name and I couldn't think of anything more creative.

Diana Alt [00:37:31]:
Yeah, you can always change the company.

Matthew Copple [00:37:33]:
Name with the llc. And then the first money I spent after creating the LLC and opening the bank account, the very first money I spent was on branding.

Diana Alt [00:37:42]:
That is such an interesting flex because most people what and it's, it's backwards. But I don't, I'm not, I don't criticize it. It just goes to show how different it is that people start. Like there's not a neat five step formula. I do think having an LLC and a bank account is a really good, at least a bank account people, if you start your thing, you don't know if you really want to invest in it. Get a separate bank account and do a credit card that you only put business is on. So even if it's not in the name of your business. Fun fact, when you start your business and you get your first business credit card, it's on your personal credit anyway.

Diana Alt [00:38:27]:
So just take one of your cards that's in your own name, set it aside, only put business stuff in it, have a bank account and your name only DB business stuff through that. That is a fundamental great way to start. And then later on if you decide you want to do the llc, you can convert things and you kind of are already mentally used to separating stuff. I didn't do branding for years. I did business on the side. I started coaching on the side in like 2013, 2013, 2014 is when I Took my first money. And then in 2018, I finally found, founded the LLC, got the bank account, all that stuff, because I was. Knew I was going to do enough to warrant it and I wanted to put that structure in place.

Diana Alt [00:39:09]:
And then I did branding in 2020, like I was doing stuff for like seven years before I did branding. And you did it first, so I didn't really did it that way. Or are you like, why the hell did I spend money on that at the outset? How do you feel about that decision now?

Matthew Copple [00:39:28]:
Oh, I, I do say, why the hell did I spend money on that at the outset?

Diana Alt [00:39:32]:
Yeah.

Matthew Copple [00:39:33]:
But I honestly, Diana, I had no idea what I was doing.

Diana Alt [00:39:36]:
You just picked some stuff. Cool.

Matthew Copple [00:39:39]:
Yeah. And I was making a good salary already, so I had a little money to spare. And I had this thing in my head that maybe if the side hustle went really well, maybe I could. The reason I founded it was to make a little extra money. But the other reason was because in our industry, layoffs are a fact of life.

Diana Alt [00:40:03]:
Yes.

Matthew Copple [00:40:05]:
And in my thinking at the time, because we had just gone through the pandemic. So my thinking at the time, and when we went through the pandemic, half of my company, they laid off half of my company, including some members of my team, and I ended up taking a haircut on pay. So my thought at the time was, if this happens, I don't just want to sit around the house sitting on resumes.

Diana Alt [00:40:34]:
Right.

Matthew Copple [00:40:34]:
I've got skills. Right. I am the technological equivalent to a handyman and I'm not a one trick pony. Not only can I do, I mean, I can do data, obviously, is what I love. And I've done a lot of different things in data, but fact of the matter is it's just programming. You program anything.

Diana Alt [00:40:56]:
Yeah.

Matthew Copple [00:40:57]:
And I have a lot of different interests in the world, in the, in the technological world, and I have a lot of different knowledge. I think it's one of the things that makes me really, it's my, it's my selling point is that I can do a lot more than just build a data warehouse. And so I thought, you know, if I get laid off, why don't I have the. I'll have this business ready and I'll just start contracting. I'll go, I might as well. You know, if you're going to wait for, if you're going to end up waiting for people to call you back on a resume anyway, why not try getting some business in and do it yourself? The worst thing that can possibly happen again is it doesn't work.

Diana Alt [00:41:34]:
So let's. And it's. It's very interesting to you because it's different in different states and countries, but I. Are you incorporated in Missouri, you guys? Yeah, I have my LLC in Kansas. It cost me $150 for the first submission of my LLC, and it costs, like, $55 to renew it every year. That's it. So when people try to tell you it's expensive to start an llc, it doesn't have to be. There is the next layer of creating what's known as an operating agreement.

Diana Alt [00:42:11]:
Yeah. Depending on your risk tolerance. I'm solo. I actually didn't have an operating agreement for my LLC for two and a half years, and then I had an attorney that I was working with on some other things. Explain some of the benefits. It just makes it even clearer that you have a business. It puts, you know, a bit less risk towards your personal finances. So I went ahead and did that.

Diana Alt [00:42:35]:
But you can start an operating agreement off of, like, LegalZoom or Nolock, fill it out, and then have an attorney review it and maybe only spend, like, one hour of an attorney's time. So that could conceivably be like 5, 600 bucks. And you have your whole LLC set up. It does not have to cost a zillion dollars. And if you aren't willing to invest. My take is if you aren't willing to invest $500 at the beginning on an LLC, you're probably doing such a minimal amount of work that just keeping the expenses separate is fine. Anyway, so it's when you start thinking, oh, I really. I want to do more, or, gosh, I made $4,000 last year, and I like that.

Diana Alt [00:43:18]:
I want some more. That it can make sense if you have. If you haven't already decided that you want to do an LLC at the outset.

Matthew Copple [00:43:25]:
So it's like, I think it was 50 bucks. And you don't have. You don't have to re register every year.

Diana Alt [00:43:31]:
Oh, yeah, we have to re register. It's like a report, but still 50 bucks. Now, California, different story. That's like $900 or something like that. And there's a lot of rules that even if you're in Missouri, like, there are reasons you could have to also incorporate in California if you don't play your cards right. So, like, it's not for faint of heart, but when you're doing limited local work, it's pretty easy to do the very first steps. So something that I thought about a lot, I actually started thinking about this when I had my first 1099 consulting job that was paid to me. It was for project management.

Diana Alt [00:44:10]:
Did it get again? AMC. Shout out AMC. But there's like a switch that flips between W2 and what we do now.

Matthew Copple [00:44:22]:
Oh yeah.

Diana Alt [00:44:23]:
So talk to us a little bit about some of the similarities and differences that you see in the W2 consultant life. Sorry the W2 full timer life versus that independent consultant life.

Matthew Copple [00:44:41]:
There's nobody, there's nobody that's going to call when you don't get up in the morning. Right. That's the biggest difference. Right. You know, if you, if you're feeling bad, you have to call into, you have to call in sick at work and if you don't, somebody's probably going to be checking up on you.

Diana Alt [00:44:59]:
Yeah.

Matthew Copple [00:44:59]:
To see if you're okay or if you're gonna show up. Right. There's nobody to, to hold. To hold account to. There's a, there's a fun little meme out on Facebook with, with otters in it and, and it says, you know, Steve wanted to call in. Steve being the otter, he wanted to call in sick. But he knew, but he knew the boss knew he was lying. And that's because Steve was the, was the boss.

Diana Alt [00:45:24]:
Right. I always say I'm the boss I've ever had.

Matthew Copple [00:45:29]:
There's. I am, I'm, I'm awful. And you know, I, it's. I often tell people this is the most fun I've ever had working twice as many hours for half as much money.

Diana Alt [00:45:40]:
Same.

Matthew Copple [00:45:45]:
And so that's the biggest thing is, is that there is nothing to keep you accountable when you become a business owner if you are not self disciplined enough to be able to discipline yourself, to get up in the morning and to do the hard things. You know, when you're a W2 employee, there's always that. I had a boss who used to always say I would get, I'm kind of a craftsman in that I really like to do. I'm a perfectionist and I really like to do the right job at the right time and I like things to be perfect. And his. He would come to me and I would be working late one night and he would just say, you know Matt, the work will still be there tomorrow morning. Go home. Right.

Diana Alt [00:46:31]:
So you have to discipline.

Matthew Copple [00:46:33]:
Work may not be there tomorrow morning.

Diana Alt [00:46:36]:
Well, what's interesting about it is like it depends on how you structure your business. And this is kind of some of the stuff that evolves over time. But I now have. In my business, I work really Hard to not have too many fixed deliverables. So right now, most of the time, the only thing is, if someone hires me to do a workshop, which I try to have prepared workshops so that it's minimal, like, oh yeah, show up on the day of the workshop and do it. But I've already developed it in the past. That's the ideal. But I try not to have firm dates because I just know that, number one, I've had some like, autoimmune health issues and I don't want like someone depending hardcore on me to deliver exactly on Monday or they're screwed if it's not till Tuesday, because what if my body fails me? But at the same time, that doesn't work for every type of business.

Diana Alt [00:47:33]:
You know, if you're embedded inside a software engineering team, working on a product that has to be delivered to the market, that hits different. So what is something else that's different about the W2 versus the solo consultant vibe?

Matthew Copple [00:47:51]:
Well, and I know that all these things sound. Probably don't sound positive and, and I don't want them to sound negative, but you don't know if the paycheck is coming next week.

Diana Alt [00:48:04]:
You know what I say? The people that are like, this was the switch that had to flip for me, two switches. Number one, it's, it's actually. When it. When I realized it was actually insane to get a hundred percent of your income from one source, that was one switch that flipped. And that flipped earlier for me. I was still in corporate America and I started having this because I worked at a company where like 30% of the revenue was derived off one client. And it was a pretty big company and I saw what negative impacts that had. So it's like, well, 30% is bad for this company.

Diana Alt [00:48:41]:
Like, how is 100% good for me? And I started doing more things on the side and also building a brand by, like, even if I spoke free, I was speaking at conferences and things.

Matthew Copple [00:48:53]:
It took me longer to figure that part out, to be quite honest with you.

Diana Alt [00:48:58]:
That had. I had a lot of exposure to some really excellent entrepreneurs at a phase in my life. Like, that was really important for me. But I had that light switch flip and I was like, oh. And then I'd also been laid off three times in my career. And I thought, it's a fiction that we're going to get paid on every other Friday anyway. We can have that any day. We can be told your services are no longer required.

Diana Alt [00:49:24]:
No one is legally required in the US to pay severance. It's a nice thing if they do it. Unemployment is peanuts. Like the stability. The idea of job security. I had the harsh realization of exactly how much of a fiction that was. And that made the transition easy.

Matthew Copple [00:49:42]:
And that, that helped, honestly, that helped pave the way for me the knowledge.

Diana Alt [00:49:48]:
That job security is fiction.

Matthew Copple [00:49:52]:
Yeah, because I remember, well, in 2001, I worked briefly for a, for a startup and they were a Linux training and system administration consulting company. And I loved that job. It was like the favorite job that I had for many, many, many years. But we literally walked into the office one day and everybody saw their paychecks that had been direct deposited the night before being pulled out of their account.

Diana Alt [00:50:21]:
Oh my God.

Matthew Copple [00:50:22]:
There was no, there was no phone service. And then the office manager comes down for. The building manager comes down and tells us that we're trespassing because they hadn't paid rent, the company hadn't paid rent for three months.

Diana Alt [00:50:35]:
Oh, well, guess you were trespassing.

Matthew Copple [00:50:39]:
And then we've lived through the Great Recession. Like if you talk to my wife or I also have the story of at DST Systems, of getting onto their Lotus Note system and just watching people disappear as they went floor to floor wild for their very first set of, of layoffs. And then after that, 2020, where, you know, the company that I was at had to lay off most of its people and every company did. Right? So, yeah, I think we've been telling people for a long time there was this kind of idea that, you know, you get with a job and you're gonna, and, and you're going to be rewarded by staying there. And, and you work with the company, the company works with you. But that just isn't the way.

Diana Alt [00:51:21]:
There are no gold watches anymore.

Matthew Copple [00:51:23]:
There's no gold watches.

Diana Alt [00:51:24]:
First layoff was I was working at a company called CSC Consultant. So it's part of the big computer sciences corporation, CSC that people know about. But it was this private consulting division which was different than all the other things. And I happened to be on the bench when they had to make cuts. And I was in the office. I was in the office pretty much every day doing training or trying to help other people with biz dev or whatever. But the first people that get cut in a consulting firm are always the people that are on the bench or the people. Maybe you're on a project, but you haven't been doing very well.

Diana Alt [00:51:57]:
You might get cut. So this day they were having all these meetings and it was funny because one of my kind of acquaintances, like friendly Ish people, but not friendly, if that makes sense. Was like, well, yeah, you know, it's only the low performers that are getting cut. This is someone I had trained on things. And I was like, I have a meeting with Patty at 12. We all know what that is, so shut it. It can happen to any of us. And a few months later, like, there was a whole other round of them.

Diana Alt [00:52:26]:
And that, you know, some of those same people that were in the office speculating that day were gone. So there's another transition that happens whenever you do this whole jump into solo consulting. Whether you've had the LLC for 10 minutes or 10 years, you move into the full timer. But oftentimes you still have the side hustle mentality until you start realizing, oh, this is my primary thing. What has the transition. But, like, where are you at on that transition from, this is speculative. This was the side hustle. If I do it for a few months and it doesn't work, like, that's fine.

Diana Alt [00:53:06]:
But to now you're treating this as truly your primary. What was that evolution like for you?

Matthew Copple [00:53:12]:
Hard, difficult, and not. Not guaranteed that that transition would succeed.

Diana Alt [00:53:21]:
Right. And I don't mean the financial part, like the getting.

Matthew Copple [00:53:25]:
No, no. I mean from a mental, emotional point of view.

Diana Alt [00:53:29]:
Okay.

Matthew Copple [00:53:30]:
I had been a W2 employee for a very, very long time. And when I decided to go full time, I still felt last year, I. I would say that probably until probably this winter, last winter, I should say last fall, I. Going through that first summer that I was at, I still had that very experimental attitude of, yeah, it might work, it might not work.

Diana Alt [00:54:01]:
It's all, I'm just trying this now.

Matthew Copple [00:54:04]:
Just trying this out. Right. But I. Around last fall is really when it started occurring to me. And part of it was because I had to get used. I had to decide if this is what I wanted to do. I was not fully convinced when I went full time in March that it was really what I wanted. It was an experiment.

Matthew Copple [00:54:27]:
I had an opportunity. And I felt like if I did not take that opportunity when it was offered that whatever happened in the future, no matter how well I did, I would always regret not trying it.

Diana Alt [00:54:42]:
I felt the same way. It's funny because, like, I left full time in 2019, and the first few months I just decompressed because I was very tired. I had been very burnt out. Like, I was replaced with like, roughly two to two and a half FTEs when I left. I had been begging for help for however long, and it didn't happen. And then they Realized naturally after you leave what is needed. But the first few months I just mostly rested. I think I took an agile coaching course.

Diana Alt [00:55:11]:
I'd had my eye on like stuff like that, but I mostly just decompressed. And then I really started in earnest in the fall. And at first I was doing technology consulting. I still regarded coaching as a side thing. I never thought that I would make that my full time. I thought I was going to do agile coaching and workshops and product management consulting, like all that. And it was one of the things I learned when I was at amc, is that if you have a contract with somebody, a contract is not like people think like, like it is with school teachers where you have to like commit murder to get released from tenure, released from your contract. It's more like you're here, you're not a full time employee, you don't get medical insurance, you serve at the pleasure of your executive and that's it.

Diana Alt [00:56:00]:
And when I realized that every day I was not asked to not come back was a positive performance review, that was another mindset shift. I had back a couple, you know, like 10 plus years ago. Same kind of thing happened for me again. I had to like revisit that in 2019, 2020 and recognize, oh my gosh, yes, as we're considering this project because there's outs. You write a contract and there's outs for both sides. Oh yeah, we're both still choosing this. We're both still choosing this. And that really helped me too.

Diana Alt [00:56:34]:
But I knew pretty quickly that I didn't want to go back. Like, I, I joke. I think a lot of entrepreneurs joke I'm unemployable. I think, yes, I could be an employee again if I had to, but man, I sure don't want to.

Matthew Copple [00:56:48]:
I'm in the same way. I. Last fall I started doing some training and just realized how much I enjoyed that. I've always enjoyed mentorship. I've always enjoyed training. I just like being in front of a crowd. I mean, let's just face it, I like the sound of my own voice. Right.

Diana Alt [00:57:04]:
You're an extroverted data guy.

Matthew Copple [00:57:07]:
Yeah, I'm a very extroverted data guy. Extremely extroverted. I, I like being around people and I thought I really, really like this. I'm not going to say I don't get stressed. There's a lot more stress in this particular position in some ways than there is than I ever had as a W2. But it's stress that I choose to take on myself and it's stress with a purpose now, like you. If it comes down to I've got some financial red lines. So business is not, you want to say an attitude shift, but this has not really been a shift.

Matthew Copple [00:57:46]:
This is what I've always felt fundamentally business is about making money. If I didn't have to make money, I would not run Grand River Analytics. I would read history books, I would travel to remote battlefields and I would try to find a place where I could teach a bunch of really bored college students about history. If I didn't want to make money, I would not be.

Diana Alt [00:58:10]:
That's your Powerball career, right?

Matthew Copple [00:58:12]:
That's my powerball career. Right. So Grand over analytics has to meet certain financial markers at certain times. And if it does not, then I will not be doing Grand over analytics anymore. Obviously I will be going back to the.

Diana Alt [00:58:28]:
Or it can become, it could go from full time to side again. Right. Yeah.

Matthew Copple [00:58:34]:
The point is, is that if I cannot, you know, if the business does not make it, then I'm very cold blooded about it. I will move on and do something else. I'm not going to cry and, and say, oh, I'm going to do this regardless because you know, I'm not going to do that.

Diana Alt [00:58:51]:
But people divide.

Matthew Copple [00:58:53]:
I do see people. I know people who should not be in business. Yeah. And it's because they are. They're making themselves, and I don't mean unemployable. Buy in that nobody will employ them. They're making themselves unemployable and that they refuse to see the writing on the wall.

Diana Alt [00:59:16]:
Yeah.

Matthew Copple [00:59:17]:
I am always looking for the writing on the wall. I want to continue to do this. I want to do this until I fall dead. Literally. I want to fall dead on a project.

Diana Alt [00:59:31]:
Same. I, I don't know that I want to fall dead like on a zoom call coaching someone on like their interview prep for their dream job.

Matthew Copple [00:59:39]:
It'd be a little rough for them.

Diana Alt [00:59:40]:
But that would be way rough for them. Very traumatizing for all involved that were still in the mortal coil. But I know that I like if I shut the business down tomorrow, if I got the Powerball and could shut the business down tomorrow, I'm still going to end up chatting up people about how they can be happier at work. That's just part of, I mean I've been doing that. I did it before I started the company, I'll do it after the company is done. So before we switch into my little lightning round real quick top thing you wish you would had done differently in the shift and Top thing, you'd keep the same if you were doing it all over again.

Matthew Copple [01:00:24]:
Top thing I wish I had done in the shift was I do wish that I had developed CEO mindset much earlier instead of contractor mindset, instead of freelance developer mindset. Cool. Going through the process or have been for a while now, of course, thinking about and building Grand river analytics, building a business. I did not think about it that way when I got into this, especially when I started as a side hustle. And then when I decided to go.

Diana Alt [01:00:59]:
Full time, I didn't either.

Matthew Copple [01:01:01]:
There's a lot of other decisions that I probably should have made at the time that would be a lot easier to do now. Now, let me say I've done pretty well. I'm not. I feel very good about where my company is at right now, and I feel very good about the things that we offer and about. And about my future as an entrepreneur. But my future would be a lot. My past would be a lot easier if I had thought about how to build the business. I was thinking about how to work the business.

Matthew Copple [01:01:32]:
I was thinking about, oh, how am I going to make sure that I get all my projects done on time? What tools am I going to use? What technologies am I going to specialize in? What? That was what I was thinking of. I wasn't thinking about, you know, all of those things that you need to think about about successorship. You know, I did one thing that I think was really good and that I. My wife was a partner in the business. That was a great there. But thinking about stuff like, you know, how do you. How do you do lead generation, bring in your clients? How are you going to keep that going? Right?

Diana Alt [01:02:05]:
How.

Matthew Copple [01:02:06]:
How are you going to build the business so that you deliver on a. On a cadence, so that you're delivering smoothly? I had to build those things.

Diana Alt [01:02:16]:
Everybody does. And. But the thing that I love that you're saying is you have to decide it's important, otherwise you're always on the hamster wheel. So is there something other than making Tamra a partner in your business that you know you would keep the same if you started over?

Matthew Copple [01:02:36]:
I would. Honestly, I think this is gonna sound strange. I think doing that branding early on was one of the best I ever did.

Diana Alt [01:02:45]:
Check, check. It was checked off. You had it done.

Matthew Copple [01:02:49]:
Not only that, but it allows me to separate myself from the business.

Diana Alt [01:02:54]:
That's awesome.

Matthew Copple [01:02:58]:
And there's. There's two reasons for that. It's not just legal and financial. Obviously, I can sell Grand river analytics without ever having to Sell Matthew Copple.

Diana Alt [01:03:05]:
Right, right.

Matthew Copple [01:03:06]:
If that happens. But also it provides a. An emotional distance that is critical to running a business. Because if the business is Matthew Copple and things go bad, then the tendency is to blame Matthew Copple to get the shoulda.

Diana Alt [01:03:27]:
It's like the shame part of it. So, like, yeah, maybe Matthew Koppel isn't great at running Grand river analytics or it runs its course, but if it's. You're saying you think you would have felt more shame if that happened and it was your name. That's a really good observation. I have to say that I wish that I would have been able to land on a brand name right now. The podcast work should feel good, but the business is Diana Alt coaching and consulting, and I sometimes wish that I had not done that, but I just couldn't land on something that felt right, so I wasn't going to let that stop me. So there's like a pro and con there. Okay, lightning round real quick.

Diana Alt [01:04:08]:
What's the worst piece of career advice you've ever received?

Matthew Copple [01:04:11]:
Came from my mother, and it was find.

Diana Alt [01:04:15]:
She.

Matthew Copple [01:04:16]:
She worked at a bank for 31 years, same bank. She was not well appreciated there. She worked her way up from teller to being a. An executive vice president, basically fourth in charge of the bank.

Diana Alt [01:04:27]:
I mean, nice job, mom.

Matthew Copple [01:04:29]:
Nice. Great job, mom. Great job, mom. She died there. But she gave me this advice that, you know, you find the business, the place, and you give them your loyalty and they will give you your loyalty back. That was bad advice in the 1990s. It is awful. Criminal malpractice today.

Matthew Copple [01:04:50]:
Now, that is from her experience, and that is also because of a very unique period in our economic history when that might actually have been true for a lot of people. Yeah, but it is not true.

Diana Alt [01:05:02]:
My parents were able to do that, too. I think they're similar in age. My parents both worked well. My mom took time off to have kids, but they both worked at the junior college level as professors and, like department heads and, you know, various different things that they did. But my dad worked a few years at a couple of other places and then he worked at the same college for like 25 years or something. And then his retirement job was another 15 years at the college that he and I both graduated from, so. But he used to say I never had to do a job interview because he got jobs on relationships. And I'm for that, but it's not the full story anymore.

Diana Alt [01:05:45]:
What is a personal habit that you have which has helped you be successful?

Matthew Copple [01:05:52]:
Stubbornness, quite frankly, Stubbornness and curiosity are the two things I get my success to.

Diana Alt [01:06:03]:
Are there ways that I'm gonna go Tim Ferriss and dig deep on this. So are there ways that. That shows up day to day? Because that's a mindset and it's characteristics of you. What do you actually do do to cultivate deliberately the curiosity and. Or the stubbornness.

Matthew Copple [01:06:22]:
The stubbornness don't have to have. Don't really have to cultivate. I got that genetically from my parents.

Diana Alt [01:06:30]:
Yes, mom and dad.

Matthew Copple [01:06:31]:
Thank Mom, Dad. They gave me lots of other good things too. The curiosity. The way I spend time every single day learning something. I pick up a book. I go do a tutorial on the net. I pick up a project. I have done this since I was a child.

Matthew Copple [01:06:51]:
I've done the same thing learning new things.

Diana Alt [01:06:55]:
I have put myself to bed reading a book, whether it's fiction, nonfiction, business, whatever, since I figured out how to operate a book. And it's one of my top Clifton, my number two CliftonStrengths is actually learner, which just means I love the process of learning. My Powerball job would probably also be to read books. You know, like just hang out and think all day and then help people think about their careers, whether it was for free or paid.

Matthew Copple [01:07:25]:
That curiosity has done more for my career than anything else in the world because I tell people I'm not. I'm not a hedgehog. I'm not an expert on any particular. I don't think of myself as an expert on any particular thing. But I know a lot about a lot of things. And I understand how those many different things connect together.

Diana Alt [01:07:45]:
That is same.

Matthew Copple [01:07:47]:
We get into trouble in businesses because everybody is siloed and specialized. I think about. I know we're going over, but I think this is important. My father had a very complex set of medical conditions when he was in the years before he passed away, he was always seeing specialists and they were always tripping over each other.

Diana Alt [01:08:10]:
Yeah.

Matthew Copple [01:08:11]:
And that is a problem we don't just have in medicine is a problem we have everywhere. But it's especially in data, in that you've got silos where I got my data here, my data here. Or we've got different people doing different things that don't know how the others do it. And somebody makes a change in one part of the business and it ripples throughout the rest of the business and throws everybody off like a bunch of don't. Like a bunch of dominoes. My specialty because of my curiosity, because I like to take that big 50,000 foot view has always been that I can help people make those connections. I can warn people, say, dude, you might want to be really careful when you make this change because it's affect something way down the road that you don't even think about. Think about your second order, your second order, your third order effects.

Matthew Copple [01:08:55]:
So that's, to me that's. And that's a lot of where I've gotten my work.

Diana Alt [01:08:59]:
I appreciate this story. A lot of my career success which I even I, I did 20 years in tech and I attribute a very high percentage of my cons, you know, my coaching career success to that time back there. But a very high percentage of my career success came from my time at Cerner from 2002 to like late 2006, almost five years there. Because Neil Patterson was the founder and CEO and he got disgusted. One, he got disgusted like, I don't know, a few months or a year before I started there because nobody could tell him how many clients the company had. They had no idea. There was no unified CRM system and the most basic piece of data they couldn't find. So they ended up deciding to buy Siebel.

Diana Alt [01:09:51]:
They did this whole effort. I was involved in that. So I got, I had like five, five years of CRM chops as an analyst and a developer and all the things. It was really great. Last question before we close. What is something you've changed your mind about recently?

Matthew Copple [01:10:07]:
Oh, well, that's, that's a weird question because I changed my mind about everything. I.

Diana Alt [01:10:15]:
It can be big or small. It can be something I believe in keeping.

Matthew Copple [01:10:18]:
I, I believe in, in keeping identity small is what I like to say. Keep your mind open and keep your identity small. What have I changed my mind on recently? You know what, I've changed my mind a lot on AI to be quite honest.

Diana Alt [01:10:36]:
Yeah.

Matthew Copple [01:10:38]:
I've always been excited about it. I am starting to get a little worried about the way artificial intelligence is being developed. We're going full speed, gallop ahead without thinking a lot about the human costs. Yeah, you and I being children of the 80s, no doubt. Remember the problems we had in the 70s and the 80s as factories began automating and people lost their jobs and we had mass unemployment along with stagflation. And we didn't have a good way of dealing with it. And we, in my opinion, we lost a whole generation of really could have been really bright people who were making some amazing innovations in our country. In part because we did such a poor job of making sure that as we transitioned through that economy these people were there were brought along one thing that's I feel like we are doing the same thing now.

Matthew Copple [01:11:38]:
We are not thinking hard at all about what the potential.

Diana Alt [01:11:43]:
There's one thing that's different that I makes me feel a little more hopeful and that is that the understanding of at least basics about AI is democratized across the world. There was the same ability to put your hands on a robot in the 70s as there is to put your hands on an LLM of any type. So absolutely people are going to want to know you Math if I did my job right, if we did our job right here, where can people find you and how would you like them? If they're interested in just getting to know you or learning about your consulting services, what are the best ways for that to happen?

Matthew Copple [01:12:28]:
We have a great [email protected] Please also feel free to look me up on LinkedIn. It's MatthewCopple. M A T T H E W C O P P L E Got about the easiest way to get a hold of me is definitely through LinkedIn. Give me a connection. Or you can also just send us an email. You can just send me an email at matthew m a t t h e w.copple c o p l e grand riveranalytics.com love to I love, I love people. So even if you don't want to contact me about about analytics, I love interesting people. So give me a, give me a holler and let's strike up a conversation.

Diana Alt [01:13:09]:
Great. Thank you so much for coming and hopefully we can do this again like in a, in like 612 months and see a little bit more about how things are going.

Matthew Copple [01:13:21]:
Yeah, I would absolutely love to.

Diana Alt [01:13:23]:
It would be really fun. All right, thanks for hanging out with us and we'll see you next time. Hey there. If your job search has you feeling stuck, check out my self paced course Job Search Essentials. It teaches the no BS 8020 steps that actually will get you results. So you can skip the fluff, focus on what matters and land your next role with confidence. Head on over to jobsearchessentials.com to learn more. And that's it for this episode of work.

Diana Alt [01:13:57]:
Should feel good. If something made you laugh, think, cry, or just want to yell yes at your phone, send it to a friend, hit follow, hit subscribe, do all the things and even better, leave a review if you've got a sec. I'm not going to tell you to give it five stars. You get to decide if I earned them work should feel good. Let's make that your reality.

Matthew Copple [01:14:19]:
Sam.